


East of the Sun, West of the Moon

by Luna



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/M, Future Fic, Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:27:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28119915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luna/pseuds/Luna
Summary: A tidelocked planet, a deadlocked marriage, and an old song looking for a new beginning.
Relationships: Eurydice/Orpheus (Hadestown), Hades/Persephone (Hadestown)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 25
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	East of the Sun, West of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [katayla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/katayla/gifts).



Persephone wonders what time it is. She stretches and spins around, her gaze taking in the whole bar. Everyone passes through here: long haul spacers, shift workers, offworld tourists basking in the novelty of constant sunshine. They cluster by the windows to watch the ships taking off, silver arrows fired into the blue Dayside sky. It's always the same blue, the sun forever hovering eighty degrees above the horizon. There's no way to tell the time, and yet, Persephone feels hers running out.

She turns back to the pretty bartender. "Another glass of wine," she says. "And tell me about your lover."

"Coming right--" The bartender flicks her fringe out of her eyes. "Who says I have one?"

"You've been humming under your breath," Persephone tells her. "And blushing at nothing. You either have a lover, or a fever."

The bartender shakes her head, but she's fighting a smile as she walks away.

Persephone licks her finger, runs it around the rim of her empty glass to make it sing. The high, clear note hangs in the air like dust motes in the light. Natural light, with infinite color in its brightness, solar energy charging her skin. Damn, is she even going to miss the dust?

When the bartender comes back with the bottle, she's actually biting her lip to keep that smile tamped down. Avoiding eye contact as she pours the wine. Persephone raises the glass in a silent toast. Three, two, one--

"I didn't realize I was humming," the bartender confesses, with a helpless little laugh. "I feel ridiculous. I don't even believe in love."

"Oh, little sister," Persephone says, gently.

"I wanted to get out of here someday." She gestures to the window. "Maybe get a job on one of the big ships. I'd see the stars, and I'd look for some cool green planet where it's easy living. And then this man--this _boy_ walks in here. He plays one song on his synthchord, and something inside me just says, _don't move, stay right here._ "

Persephone rests her chin on her hand, sipping her wine and making an occasional encouraging sound. Truth be told, she couldn't care less about the boy's brown eyes and deft hands, his plans, his promises. She just wants to keep the girl talking about him. The hot bloom of her face, the sweet bewilderment and the burning hunger underneath. How she's been in the desert all her life--a tiny fragment of eternity--and never realized she was thirsty until a stranger led her to water. A wellspring. No, a flood. Persephone can get drunk on that, in a way she never does on wine. 

"I'm sorry, I'm talking your ear off--"

"Never apologize," Persephone says. "I certainly don't."

The bartender's eyes are unfocused, dreamy. "It's just new, you know?"

The ground shudders like a massive animal jerking awake. A sound too low to hear vibrates bottles on the shelves, rattles teeth in skulls. In spite of the sun, the room darkens. Shadows swing wildly across the walls, and fall back in silence, not quite in the right places.

"Did you feel that?" someone asks, in a high, panicked voice. Someone not from around here. "Did anyone else feel that?" The regulars hunch their shoulders, curl their hands around their drinks. Nobody says, _the Train's pulled in._

Persephone finishes her wine slowly, deliberately, though all the warmth has gone out of it. "Everything starts out new," she tells the bartender.

She doesn't answer. The Train hasn't disturbed her dream. Maybe she already knows who it's come for. She looks straight through Persephone, out through the window, as if she knows exactly where her lover is right now, knows he can see her smile.

Feeling suddenly cruel--feeling her age, and cold sober--Persephone covers the bartender's hand with her own, presses her knuckles tightly. "Keep your eyes open," she says. "Don't forget who you were before he came along."

She's startled by the bitterness in her tone. She sounds like her mother, giving advice that she knows won't be heeded, like scattering seeds over stone. 

"Thank you," the bartender says. And maybe it's Persephone, but _that_ tone sounds like pity. 

Persephone jerks her hand back, just as a messenger calls her name over the tannoy. She pays the bar tab and picks up her vacuum suitcase. It holds all her baggage, all her souvenirs, compressed down to atoms. Everything but Day itself.

Her name sounds again, in the messenger's programmed, indifferent voice. For the first time in a long time, she shivers. 

"Love isn't worth staying anywhere forever," she tells the bartender, and turns to go before the fire in the girl's face goes out.

*

The Train has the hull and engine of a starship, but instead of flying, it cuts. It slashes across the plains, hacks like a cleaver through the mountains of the Stygian Zone, carves a bloodless canyon deep into the ice fields.

Inside, Persephone is strapped to her seat, staring straight ahead, playing her part.

Hades places his hand over hers, cool and firm, steady pressure. She doesn't flinch. Neither does she turn her palm up and entwine their fingers, as she used to do. The G-force makes speaking difficult. She's grateful for that, at least.

Too soon, the Train begins to slow. There's the explosion as it plummets below the speed of sound, the bone-shaking grind to a halt. Persephone allows Hades to help her to her feet. He offers her his coat; she shrugs it away. There's no point in trying to defend herself from the Nightside cold.

The airlock opens, and everything is blinding white. The terminal is all polished metal and tile under a dome of solid ice. There are no windows, no cracks in the ceiling, not one restful glimpse of the black sky. _Welcome home,_ Persephone thinks, as the titanium doors seal shut behind her. "You've been busy."

Hades bows his head, smiling. "Darlin', you ain't seen nothin' yet."

The glare of fluorescent lights makes Persephone feel stripped naked, flayed open. She folds her arms tightly across her chest. Hades keeps talking about everything he's been buying and selling. "Enough," she says.

"All right," he says. He leans down to her, close enough to breathe her hair in. "You can see it for yourself, later. You look lovely, by the way."

If he'd said anything else, she might have been able to lean back into his arms. If he'd asked her just one question. What did you do while you were away? How far did you go? How's the family? If he could admit, just once, that she exists away from him, apart from his wanting her-- _you look lovely_. "No," she says. "I mean, haven't you done enough? What's the point of all this?"

"The new cryochambers will--"

"I heard you," she says, pacing, her heels striking thunder off the hard floor. "You bring those poor people in. You freeze their bodies and merge their minds. You mine their thoughts for data. You bring in more people. It all keeps growing, faster and faster."

"Yes." He's following her step for step, as if they're tied together. Chained. "Isn't it beautiful?"

She whirls around to face him. "It's a cancer."

When he frowns, he looks older than she's ever seen him, deep lines clawed into his face. He's _hurt_ , and it makes her throat tighten, makes her almost wish she could take it back. But there's something else. A lift in her chest, a terrible little satisfaction. _She's_ hurt him.

He holds out his hands, coat still folded over one arm. "I do it for you," he says.

"Well. That's fine, then." She shivers theatrically, letting her teeth chatter, throwing her arms open to embrace emptiness. "Thank you, Hades, it's all I've ever wanted."

"No, I know you better than that." All the shadows in the room are pooled under his eyes. "All you want is everything you don't have."

Persephone could almost thank him, for kindling her anger so that it heats her up a little. Her omniscient, omnipotent husband. Did she actually believe that, once? She did. "And you just want a warm body around," she says. "Someone to be dazzled by your brilliance. No reason it has to be me." 

"You're my wife."

"That's not a reason."

His mouth twists. The ghost of a smile. "Used to be."

"Maybe you'd like me better frozen," she says. It feels like she's crossing some line drawn long ago in the dirt, but she can't remember why it matters, and she's too angry to care. "You'd have me all to yourself. Keep me nice and quiet, and perfect on the outside. You'd probably say you did that for me, too."

She wants to storm out without running, without giving him the satisfaction of chasing her. She takes two steps and something brushes against her cheek. A flower slipping from her hair. She pulls it free, this tiny scrap of color dying between her fingertips.

"Everything I build, you despise," Hades says. The way he stares at her makes the fluorescent lights seem forgiving. "Call it a cancer. At least one of us is growing something."

Her hands clench into fists, crushing the flower. She opens her mouth to scream at him, but she has no words. This is how the season of silence begins.

*

No one comes into the bar these days, so Eurydice has had time to clean every glass. To sterilize the bottles and taps, erasing her own fingerprints. Once, she even got down on her knees and UV-scrubbed the floor. She backed herself into a corner and sat there, dizzy from the heat. The room spun, then stopped spinning. No one came.

She's covered the windows with sheets of polycarbonate, but she can still hear the wind pounding on the other side. There's no traffic in this weather. Everything is grounded; everything is empty. So is she.

She dozes, slumped over the bar with her head resting on her arms. The bony knob of her wrist grinds into her cheek. She dreams of Orpheus, and tears run from her closed eyes, because she knows it's only a dream and she'll wake up alone.

She opens her eyes. There's a stranger sitting next to her.

"Steady," he says, as she jumps to her feet. He shows her the glass of whiskey he's poured himself. "Didn't want to trouble you."

"What are you doing here?" Her voice is hoarse, her mouth dry. She thinks of the raygun underneath the bar.

His laugh is as rusty as her voice. "I guess I'm taking a holiday." 

Eurydice wills her heart to stop racing. She smoothes the front of her dirty apron, walks around behind the bar. There's money, useless offworld currency, in the register. Maybe that's all this strange man wants. "Who goes on holiday in a dust storm?" she says, trying to sound casual.

The strange man ponders this as if it's a serious question. "Maybe this is better than where I came from."

"Is it?"

"Nope." 

She studies him as he sips his whiskey. Gray hair, expensive gray suit. A thick ring on his left hand that could be silver or chrome. No, it can't be money he's after. She inches closer to the raygun.

He nods at a stack of glasses. "Why don't you fix something for yourself? On me."

"I'm waiting for someone," she says, pasting on a smile. She hopes that he pictures some huge bruiser of a dockworker. Someone nearby enough to hear her scream.

"I won't keep you long." He swirls his glass, whiskey glinting in the lamplight. "Nice to know the world still has faithful women in it."

Eurydice exhales slowly. Wherever he's come from, she knows where that line leads; she can read the slouch of his shoulders. Thousands of men have sat in that exact spot, complaining about their wives and trying to flirt with her at the same time. She knows how to handle this. She pastes on a smile.

"Don't worry," the man says. "I won't tell you my sad story. You know it already."

"Oh," she says. "Have you been here before?"

"Long, long before your time. But I know people." He looks up. His eyes are set very deep in his pale face, so it's as if he's looking at her from some far-off, lonely place--

The wind picks up, and the power flickers, the lights going out for a second and coming back weakened. Eurydice ducks her head, twists a rag between her fingers. The man knocks back some more whiskey.

"Here's how it goes," he says. "You start with nothing. Just the dirt you're standing on. And you have to scratch a living out of it. Dig deep, move weight, find the gold in the rocks." He raises an eyebrow. "Or you pour drinks for strangers passing through a busted-up spaceport. Either way. You're breaking your back."

This time her smile is genuine. "I do know that story."

"You work hard. You should take pride in that." The man sits up straight, thumps his chest. "It's all that lasts. All you can depend upon. The work of your hands, the sweat of your brow. And sometimes it's enough."

She looks around the bar. In her mind, she takes the chairs down from the tables, unveils the windows to a peaceful blue sky. She remembers when the locals had work and the travelers came in from all over. It hasn't been that long. She was telling stories, laughter pouring as freely as wine. And Orpheus was leaning against the wall, playing and singing. His head thrown back, his hands dancing, all muscle and grace.

Everyone was happy when they met. Maybe because they met. Something in the universe had been set right.

"Yes," she says, "Sometimes it's enough."

"And sometimes--" He clears his throat. "One time," he says. "Once in your life."

Their eyes meet again, and she sees that lonesome place. She sees herself there. Her own hunger, her own longing and wondering and waiting, written on an old man's face. She has to put a hand on the bar to steady herself. "A singularity," she says.

"In every sense of the word. A singular moment. A moment when someone becomes infinitely valuable to you. A moment you can't even conceive of 'til it happens, and then there's no turning back."

She nods. "I think I'll have that drink now."

She reaches for the whiskey bottle and fills a glass for herself. She doesn't remember ever drinking anything this expensive and smooth. It smokes in her throat, settles warm in her stomach, fills up every hollow place. A heartbeat later, the good feeling is gone.

"Now someone else has the best of you," the man says. "Your money, your time, your peace of mind."

"Your dreams," she says.

"Your sanity," he says. "Off they go. Chasing the sun. Following their hearts." He laughs again, harshly. "And dragging our hearts after them in the dirt." 

It hasn't been that long. She has to keep telling herself that, cling to it. Even though it seems like this is the worst dust storm she's ever seen, a storm made to sweep a man away, or drown him in grit, bury every track and trace of him. "How long _has_ it been?" 

"Too long. Waiting for love, it's always too long."

She shakes her head. "For you," she says. "Since you saw your...?

"My wife. Ah, my wife." He spreads his hands out and his ring clanks against the bar. "We're like this planet. Tidelocked. We've been going around in circles for longer than you've been alive. You're a young one," he adds, frowning at her. "Too young for this."

"It's not always this bad," she says, as much to herself as to him.

"Like I said, you're young. Take it from me. It's all downhill from here."

Eurydice wants to tell him he's wrong. She may be young, but she's lived. Survived. She knows how to conserve water and coax fire out of embers, how to curl her body into the smallest shadow when she needs rest. It was always hard work, but it wasn't suffering.

But that was before her singularity. 

She clutches her glass, listening to the roar of the storm outside. For a moment she's sure that it's singing to her, carrying Orpheus's voice like a banner. _Hold on. I'll find what I'm looking for, I'll bring it home to you_. She blinks, and it's all white noise. But her heart is out there in that storm. It won't ever be just weather again. She will be listening for Orpheus until she dies.

The man stands, turning up the collar of his coat. "I should be going," he says. "But I don't want to leave you here alone."

The blunt truth of that word: alone. More alone than she ever was, when she had no one to wait for. "I'll be all right," she says, and rubs her eyes with the side of her hand, like a child. "It'd be better, so much easier, if I could just...get some sleep. Real sleep."

He reaches across the bar and very gently tips her chin up. She's surprised that she doesn't mind the touch. They know one another, after all. They are on the same side. He gives her that long look. So far away, so close.

"I do know something to help with that," he says.

"Tell me," she says.

He sits back down. Picks up the bottle and pours for both of them, generously. The lights flicker, the windows rattle, taking punches from the punishing wind. "To absent friends," he says.

"Thank you," Eurydice says, picking up her whiskey. "Absent friends."

Their glasses touch. They drink deep. She breathes out a sigh. 

The man says, "And to pleasant dreams."

*

Persephone always gets used to the cold. First her skin goes numb, then her bones harden, even her blood slowing down. She drinks red wine to keep it moving.

She gets used to the filtered, sterilized air without a single microbe or speck of pollen alive in it. She smokes a nargile to breathe in something that isn't so relentlessly pure.

She lies in her bed, the bottle and the pipe within reach, and imagines the ice melting all around her, becoming an ocean, bearing her away. She floats to the far side of the planet, lying on the beach, bronzing in the sun. And Hades is left behind on the Night shore, howling.

He hasn't been howling after her. Hasn't been coming to her bed. His absence might be the only thing more annoying than his attention. Persephone gets used to the cold and the stillness, but she can't get used to _nothing_. She throws a cloak around her shoulders and goes looking for him.

The halls sprawl out for miles, spiraling under the ice. Wherever Persphone walks, she's following Hades' footsteps, witnessing the work he's done. Mechanized mines, server banks, reactors smashing atoms into energy. For what? To feed themselves and the other machines. They're all snakes swallowing their own tails. 

She begins whistling as she walks, then talking out loud so the echo of her own voice keeps her company. She decides to make a list of everything she'll go find when she's free to leave again. "Date palms," she says.

 _Date palms,_ the echo agrees.

"Blue agave. Honeysuckle. Honeybees." 

_Bees?_

"Yes. I think they still raise them on one of the moons. That craggy one, with the tea plantations--was that a moon or a planet?"

Of course an echo can't answer a question. Persephone glances over her shoulder, certain that Hades has eyes in the walls, spying on her, watching her boredom turn into desperation. She raises her head, makes her walk slow and stately. "Quiver trees," she mutters. "Opium poppies."

Eventually, inevitably, Persephone winds up back at the center of the spiral. She's too tired to keep going and too restless to lay herself down in an empty bed. There's nothing else to do except give into temptation, walk right into the trap that Hades has set for her.

She goes to his room, sits down in his chair, and picks up his headset. Curses him, curses herself. Then she puts it on, a wire crown, and a galaxy unfolds before her. Words in every tongue, maps of every starfield, instincts and fears older than language. Worlds that only exist behind closed eyes.

The merged mind, dreaming.

Hades does this for power. He loves dates and coordinates, secret calculations, the river of cold numbers and hard facts. That's where he takes his pleasure and makes his money. Persephone is not like her husband. He strips their minds of everything. She only touches them lightly, taking a hit of sense memory. 

The bittersweet, burnt smell of space. The fierce gasp of a child rescued from drowning. Just a little more, she tells herself. First bite of a crisp Hesperidian apple. One sister's hot tears soaking into another's hair. More. A perfect spiderweb beaded with rain. More.

Fingers dancing over a synthchord, a brown-eyed boy singing a love song--

Persephone pulls the headset off and throws it on the floor. A headache throbs at her temples. She presses her hands to her ears, trying to hold in the last lingering notes.

She could be wrong. Any drifting musician might have a dozen sweethearts. Or a stranger might have caught the melody in passing. It's foolish of her to be so sure. But she's already out of the chair, running down one passageway after another until she finds her way to the cryochambers.

These are vast caverns, so cold that it pierces through her numbness, nitrogen vapor turning her face wet as she walks among the sleepers. So many. She hadn't thought there would be so many. She gathers her cloak in a shaking hand, wipes frost from motionless faces. Some of their eyes are open. None of them see her.

She can't stay there long enough to search thousands upon thousands of faces. Hades would catch her. Hades would laugh at her, forever, his scorn cutting through her, sharper than obsidian. And what's the point, what could she do, if she found the sleeper she's looking for? 

She takes a deep breath, though it makes her lungs burn, and braces herself the way she does when she feels the Train coming. 

"I'm sorry, little sister," Persephone whispers, and makes her way out.

Time passes slowly. She sleeps with Hades, but never speaks to him, not one word. Empty bottles colonize the floor of her bedroom. Sometimes she goes wandering, with no apparent plan or destination, and finds herself back in the cryochambers. She looks for the girl and abandons her, over and over.

She is walking the frozen rows, wondering how many times she's done this and why she doesn't give up, when she hears a movement that is not her own.

Her footsteps stop. Her heart lurches into her throat. She closes her eyes, listens with all her might.

It's a sound as small as an infant's cry in the void, a sound so soft that Persephone can't make out the words. She doesn't need them. She knows the voice.

*

The first thing the girl knows is the boy's voice. A filament. Sensation of movement, of lifting. The boy is saying--something. Something that will lead her out of the dark. Shockwaves of pain. Something unbearable is happening to her. She's on fire. On fire and somehow, soaking wet. No. She is thawing. An arm around her waist, holding her up. Orpheus's arm. Orpheus's voice, calling her name.

She has a name. 

Eurydice doesn't know how long she's been under, or how long it takes for her to stop coughing. By the time she has her eyes open, and enough breath in her body to say Orpheus's name back to him, they are standing in a gleaming white hall, in front of the gods.

 _Gods_ is the only word she knows for what they are. Seeing them together, she can't understand how she didn't see it before. In their presence, the air is strange, electric, as if reality is holding its breath. _Tidelocked,_ the man told her. Two halves of a world far beyond her own.

And she doesn't care about them at all, because Orpheus is here. Orpheus came for her.

"Orpheus," Eurydice says. His face coming into focus at last. Windburnt skin, wet eyes, and the untamed brilliance of his smile. 

"I told you I'd come home," he says.

"Home isn't here--"

"Yes, it is. You are."

"Touching scene," the old man says. "Hate for it to end in tears."

"Hades," the wife says. "Don't do this. Don't--toy with them."

He pays her no mind. "I'm a fair man. A hard-working man. Not in the habit of taking what isn't mine."

The wife covers her mouth with her hand, makes a noise that is equal parts laugh and sob.

"I don't look kindly on thieves. But I see that Persephone likes you. And--" His eyes light on Eurydice. "I like you."

She flinches. Orpheus tightens his arm around her. His hand is curled into a fist, fingers scraped and broken, indigo with frostbite. He couldn't play a note without bleeding. "Your hands," she says. "Oh--"

"It's nothing," he says.

"I did this to you," she says. He shakes his head. "No, I did. I gave up on you."

"I was gone too long," he says. "I got lost. I guess we both did. If you forgive me, then you have to forgive yourself." He says it that simply, like a fact of nature. But it is also a question. 

Everything in her body is trembling, but she holds his gaze as steady as she can. "Then I have to," she answers.

Hades claps his hands and it's like thunder, and there is lightning in his eyes. "It's time, son," he says. "Get busy singing or get busy dying."

Orpheus kisses her, a taste of pure oxygen. He plants his feet, lifts his chin, and begins to sing.

_I don't know if it was long ago, or if it's yet to be._

He sings about a world that spun--or will spin--differently. Where the weather was gentler, where time flowed smoothly instead of hurtling and crashing along. There were--or will be--roads through the border mountains. Oceans flow to the edges of the desert. Day and Night touch each other. Change each other.

She can feel him shaking, too, and knows it's more than cold or pain. She's holding him up, as much as he's holding her. There is no strength in either of them alone. Together--

_I don't know if you're a rich man, or a poorer man than me._

It might be her vision, but the light in the room seems to shift, to coalesce around Orpheus. The song tells the story of the gods, and they listen as if they've never heard it before. And they haven't, not in his voice. His voice that rides on storm winds and turns her name to gold--

_All of your wisdom couldn't stop you from falling when you first saw her._

And Orpheus turns his back on the gods, not waiting for their judgment. He sings to Eurydice, in harmony with her breath, in perfect rhythm with her heartbeat. 

They have chosen each other. They're choosing. They will always choose. It doesn't matter that the only guarantee is grief, that the happiest ending they can hope for is to die at the same time.

_Love is the center of gravity, and flying's just falling forever._

*

The boy leaves first, with bandages wrapped around his wounded hands, and a torch to light his way, but without the girl. He'll have to blaze a trail for her, Hades told him. He'll have to prove that he can wait for her on the far side.

The girl leaves later, wrapped in Persephone's cloak, with all the food and water she can carry. It seems unlikely that she's ready to walk all that distance, but the glow is coming back into her face. She's getting stronger. And after all, there are passages under the ice, satellites watching from the sky. They won't let her get lost.

The Terminal airlock seals shut behind them, but Persephone still stands there, like a mother watching after a child who's leaving home for good. Her chest aches at the thought. She might never find out whether they make it back into each other's arms.

"You, too," Hades says, behind her.

She turns. He's holding out his coat, hands at the level of her shoulders, waiting for her to step into it, and then to leave him.

"I never wanted you to freeze," he says.

"I know that," she says, but she thinks of the abyss of silence that opened up between them, the complete lack of faith. "Maybe I forgot, a little."

"I was never going to hold you against your will." 

She puts one arm into the sleeve of the coat. Pauses like that, craning her neck so she can see his face. "You weren't so very old when we met," she says. He winces, and she adds, "You aren't so much older now. On the scale of geological time, you know. We're both--we're very young."

He bends down; she stretches up. The kiss is both fresh and familiar, like the first time she heard that boy sing and already knew the song.

Hades pulls back with a quiet sigh. "Funny how we both got to be wrong about each other," he says.

That is funny, or it might be, someday. Persephone manages a smile. "Hades, you can read a million minds," she says. "It's not the same as understanding someone."

She slides her other arm into the coat. Tips her head back against his shoulder. The high dome of ice above them has thinned, clarified. Now she can see the great, calm darkness of the sky, if not the stars.

"It's time for me to go," she says. 

His hands on her waist, not gripping, simply resting there. "I'll wait for you."

Persephone takes her first step away. Her second step. Her hand is on the panel by the door. The Train is ready for her, engines humming. She wants to feel Daylight on her skin again. To dance with strangers, to taste honey. And to find the tiniest seed she can, bury it deep in the earth, and watch it grow. She wants to start from the beginning.

"Wait a while," she says. "Then come and find me. I'll be the woman walking in the garden."

He rocks back on his heels. She can't think what his expression reminds her of, though she's pretty sure it's mirrored on her own face.

"I'll be the man with the half-broken heart," Hades says. "Whistling a tune."

Now she knows what he looks like, what she feels like. It's a spark from her earliest memory, from a world just discovering its orbit. It's something that lies ahead of them, almost close enough to see. It's a promise. A horizon. Dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> Biggest of beta thanks to soupytwist, mazily, branwyn and jae.


End file.
